Turn on the Joost

I got my invite today to Joost. I have to say, it's pretty impressive.

If you haven't heard of Joost (juice + boost?) -- and most haven't -- it's a video distribution system that uses peer-to-peer technology to deliver full-screen video quickly to anywhere around the globe.

In English -- it acts like a cable company, offering you lots of television shows and music videos. Except it's free. And it uses the internet. It comes from the guys who made Skype and it works kind of like Napster. Everyone running Joost becomes a relay-station. The more people using Joost, the faster it gets for everyone because the content sits temporarily on your computer while you're watching it and if someone nearby wants to see the same thing, it gets bounced to them, instead of having to all sit on one central server. (Some theorize that Apple will do the same thing with iTunes and your Apple TV box -- temporarily co-opt it from time-to-time to get content out to you quickly that it thinks you might want to buy, all transparently. But that's another topic for Robert X. Cringley - link at right.)

Anyhow, I got my invitation today. It's still in beta and I'm betting that there's not a lot of people using it yet. The only computer I've got that will run the software is connected wirelessly to my network so I'm getting, at best, 11 mbps. there is occasionally some lag time before a show starts, but the quality's pretty decent on full screen and it wasn't pausing too much. Pretty impressive this early on. It will only get better as the software improves and more people start running it. Not a lot of content that interests me yet, but that's not to say there isn't a lot of content -- there is. I expect that Joost will only get bigger and bigger and will sign more and more big content deals. No more going to individual websites to watch shows on less-than-full-screen.

(The poor quality of the screen grab is my fault.)